The revelation hung in the air like smoke—The Hollow King. A name ancient and terrible, whispered only in myth and ruin-songs. Duncan stared at the Emissary, the flickering holograms of the old Dominion casting fractured light across their faces.
"What is it?" Duncan asked, his voice a taut whisper.
The Emissary's eyes glimmered with something between reverence and dread. "The Hollow King was never a ruler. He was a failure. The first shardbearer who consumed rather than bonded. He sought to control all Vaults. His soul fractured the world. The Dominion buried him—deep beneath the Vaults, behind layers of living seals. But the seals are weakening."
Duncan's pulse thundered in his ears. "Why now?"
"Because you live," the Emissary replied. "Because you carry the shard that once refused him."
The chamber beneath the Spire trembled faintly, as if the words themselves stirred something slumbering in the earth. Duncan stepped away from the glowing images. His hands were clenched, jaw tight. His father's death, the Maw's awakening, the beasts' growing unrest—it was all part of something older. A cycle reigniting.
He faced the Emissary. "If you've known all this, why wait until now to act?"
"We couldn't act until the right line awakened. Your bloodline is a key, Duncan. Your ancestor wielded the Dominion's last pure shard. You inherited its spark—and its curse."
Duncan turned his gaze toward a black obelisk rising from the center of the chamber. It pulsed faintly, wrapped in Dominion sigils. Something inside it called to him—not in words, but in sensation: pressure, warmth, gravity. A pull.
"What is that?"
"The Spire's core," the Emissary said softly. "A sealed fragment of the Hollow King. Not his body. His thought. His will. We study it… and we pray it never wakes."
But as Duncan approached, the shard in his arm pulsed harder. It glowed brighter, threads of flame licking up his veins. The obelisk responded in kind, flaring with mirrored energy.
A sudden vision struck him.
He stood on a battlefield of stars. Cities burned across a night-sky horizon. Vaults cracked open like eggs, releasing not beasts but forms—shifting things of smoke and bone, with crowns of silence and mouths that sang madness. At the center of it all stood a figure cloaked in hollow light, with a mask made of mirrors and a throne carved from the ribs of worlds.
The Hollow King.
Duncan fell to one knee, gasping.
The vision passed.
Alra's voice broke through the haze—"Duncan, what's wrong?"
He blinked. She wasn't here. She was far away, back at Fort Halbridge. This place—this Spire—it was using the shard to connect him to the Dominion's memory, even across time and space.
The Emissary helped him to his feet.
"You've seen it," the pale man said. "The end that once came… and will come again, unless the Vaults are rebalanced."
Duncan steadied his breathing. "Then we stop it."
"We can't stop it," the Emissary replied. "We can only choose—contain or crown. The Hollow King will rise. The question is whether it's as a tyrant… or a weapon to wield."
Duncan recoiled. "You'd control it?"
"No," the Emissary said. "But you might."
The suggestion sent ice through Duncan's veins. He had come seeking truth. Now he stood before a choice that reeked of destiny and damnation both.
"I need time," he said.
"You don't have much," the Emissary replied. "The southern Vault at Drehlspire stirs. The next shard calls. You will feel it. Soon."
That night, Duncan stood alone atop the Spire. The wind howled across the chasm, whispering secrets from long-dead civilizations. In the sky above, a crimson star pulsed slowly—a signal, the Emissary had said, from the skyforge constellation. A clock the Dominion once used to measure breachwaves.
Alra's voice echoed in his thoughts.
Kaelen's oath.
The deaths in the Maw.
And the face of the creature that had once been his father.
Duncan looked down at his glowing arm.
Was he still a soldier?
A son?
Or merely a vessel for history's last gamble?
He raised his hand to the wind.
"I'm coming, Drehlspire," he whispered. "And I'll decide what lives… and what stays buried."